StorageReview.com offers detailed coverage of the enterprise
storage market, including news and in-depth reviews of the latest flash storage,
hard drive, NAS, and SAN units, as well as high-speed networking equipment.

FEATURED by Adam Armstrong

Data volume, especially Big Data, continues to grow at amazing rates, however, IT budgets are growing at the same rate. Organizations are looking to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) to help them tackle the growing data volume. HGST’s latest helium drive, He10, is an effective tool they can use to do just that. The He10 is a 10TB HDD that utilizes PMR technology and HGST’s proven HelioSeal technology. This new HDD is designed to deliver capacity, efficiency, reliability, and reduced power usage to the data center.

December 8th, 2016 by Brian Beeler

StorageReview has launched a new program in 2016 to honor products that we believe represent the best of the best in enterprise IT. During a review or hands on evaluation process, SR will determine if the product under consideration has excelled to a point where an Editor's Choice Award is warranted. There are several reasons why a product could earn an award, including but not limited to:

December 7th, 2016 by Adam Armstrong

Nexenta has announced a new edition of its NexentaEdge, its file and object storage platform. The new NexentaEdge DevOps Edition is designed to work with scalable on-premise container-converged infrastructure as a high-performance storage solution.

December 7th, 2016 by Adam Armstrong

Today Dell EMC is expanding its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) by combining the former two companies technologies once again. Dell EMC’s is taking its VxRack software-defined data center (SDDC) and is now basing it on PowerEdge servers. According to the company, this combination will enhance flexibility while increasing performance.

December 6th, 2016 by Adam Armstrong

Today Cisco announced that it would be expanding its Cloud-Scale Networking solutions. These expanding solutions are designed to help service providers and web companies get the most out of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) as they transition their central offices to next-generation data centers.

December 6th, 2016 by Adam Armstrong

Today at Western Digital Corp.’s Investor Day 2016, WDC introduced several new storage technologies. WDC introduced a new NVMe-over-PCIe fabric advanced flash platform for cloud-scale data center infrastructures. Along with this WDC introduced new SSDs (including their highest capacity to date at just under 8TB and a new NVMe SSD) as well as the highest capacity HDD at 12TB.

December 5th, 2016 by Adam Armstrong

Today Schneider Electric announced new prefabricated data center solutions. The company has expanded on its existing offerings with two new product families that are designed to generate more flexibility, reliability, and speed deployments. Schneider also plans on getting these prefabricated solutions to customers faster with its new Quick Ship Program. And the company has opened up a new manufacturing facility located in West Chester, Ohio, fairly close to us here at StorageReview.

December 5th, 2016 by Adam Armstrong

This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content not the impact they have. Zephyr announced its enterprise architecture, Zephyr Enterprise, as well as the announcement that they have hit 10,000 customers. SwiftStack announced the availability of its Cloud Sync. Avere joins AWS Public Sector Partner Program. Cloudistics and Pica8 partner on secure virtual networking for superconverged infrastructures. And Datirum raises another $55 million in Series C financing.

December 5th, 2016 by Adam Armstrong

Today Micron Technology, Inc. introduced its new enterprise SATA SSD family, the Micron 5100 family. The 5100 family comes in three models for varying needs of data centers and comes with a maximum capacity of 8TB, the highest capacity for a SATA SSD currently available. Micron is positioning its new family of drives to act as a bridge for organizations as they transition to all-flash data center.

December 2nd, 2016 by Brian Beeler

The SATADOM has been a popular way of leveraging a small amount of flash to get a boot image onto a server without burning one of the more valuable drive bays. For many OS images or hypervisors, the concept works perfectly well, some users can even get away with an SD card for such purposes. The SATADOM has several benefits though, including higher quality NAND and performance that far outstrips a memory card. Supermicro calls their effort in this space a SuperDOM, largely because the performance profile is higher than what traditional SATADOMs have offered; it's more along the lines of a standard SSD. The Supermicro SuperDOM uses a SATA 6Gb/s interface to connect directly to the server board and comes in capacities up to 128GB. The SuperDOM supports both X9 and X10 boards and uses only 1-2 watts.

December 2nd, 2016 by Brian Beeler

The SATADOM has been a popular way of leveraging a small amount of flash to get a boot image onto a server without burning one of the more valuable drive bays. For many OS images or hypervisors, the concept works perfectly well, some users can even get away with an SD card for such purposes. The SATADOM has several benefits though, including higher quality NAND and performance that far outstrips a memory card. Supermicro calls their effort in this space a SuperDOM, largely because the performance profile is higher than what traditional SATADOMs have offered; it's more along the lines of a standard SSD. The Supermicro SuperDOM uses a SATA 6Gb/s interface to connect directly to the server board and comes in capacities up to 128GB. The SuperDOM supports both X9 and X10 boards and uses only 1-2 watts.

December 1st, 2016 by Lyle Smith

The Dell Ultrasharp UP3017 a a 30-inch LED-backlit LCD monitor that features a 16:10 aspect ratio, 2560x1600 resolution and Dell's PremierColor technology. The color tuning and matte finish make the UP3017 well-positioned to tackle the demands of professionals who desire color accuracy and the ability to tweak if needed, but appreciate the true-to-life colors out of the box with no manual calibration required. As is standard with this class of Dell monitor, the unit contains a plethora of input and output connections, along with support for KVM and daisy chaining displays.

November 28th, 2016 by Lyle Smith

A few years ago, we reviewed the Eaton 9PX6K, a UPS from the company’s line of high-efficiency battery backups designed to protect medium-to-high-density IT equipment in computer rooms. Overall, we found that it offered comprehensive management and power protection and kept our lab tests running seamlessly. Earlier this year, the company released a broader range of models in the Eaton 9PX line, which consisted of devices that fit in a slightly smaller scope. Among these new models is the 2U 9PX3000RTN 3000VA 120V UPS, which we will be looking at today.

November 20th, 2016 by Lyle Smith

The new Seagate IronWolf HDD is designed for all types of NAS use cases, including those that leverage multi-RAID environments, with capacities spanning up to 10TB. Seagate has had a lot of success with their purpose-built drives in the past, such as the Seagate Enterprise, Seagate NAS, and Seagate SkyHawk Surveillance HDDs. And their new line is certainly specced to follow in their footsteps. Featuring multi-tier caching technology, this uniquely named drive is built to handle the constant vibration that is inherent in 24/7 NAS spindle drives and thrives under heavy user-workload rates in a high data-traffic network.

November 18th, 2016 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Veritas merged with Symantec back in 2004 only to be spun back off last year as its own data management company. Symantec kept its security and Veritas gained NetBackup. NetBackup is an enterprise heterogeneous backup and recovery suite that that provides backup for several operating systems, physical systems, cloud, and virtualization such as VMware and Hyper-V. Veritas takes this one step farther and offers NetBackup on an appliance for what it calls an efficient, turnkey solution for backup, storage, and deduplication. Currently the NetBackup appliances are offered in two solutions: the 5200 series (which we will be looking at in this review) that is designed to be cost-optimized, and the 5300 series that is more performance-optimized.